THERE'S A TERRIFIC INGENUITY to Bill Stiteler's locally lensed film THACO. In some ways, it's not much of a film. THACO hasn't got a plot so much as an obsessive collection of minutely detailed in-jokes about the world of role playing games and the sorts of adult men who still play them. The writing is sharp, if you're a gamer, and potentially incomprehensible if you aren't. Fortunately, Stiteler also focuses his attention on the strained friendship of four men, one played by Stiteler himself, who are well into adulthood, and whose relationship with the sometimes obsessively juvenile world of gaming has begun to change. One of the funnier jokes in the film, repeated throughout, is that the characters are so nerdy that they annoy each other; the joke becomes poignant when it starts coming out that these characters are a little exhausted by their own nerdiness, too.
But I'm not interested in reviewing THACO, as I think a lot of the sort of stuff critics discuss, such as the quality of an actor's performance, or the technical proficiency of a film, are both beside the point and rather uninteresting here. I was more interested in the fact that Stiteler originally created THACO as a Fringe Festival show and then decided to film it -- something I think we're going to start seeing a lot of -- and how carefully he has crafted a niche for this project. It really is a film that is almost exclusively by gamers and for gamers, and that is the market Stiteler is primarily targeting.
Stiteler has done something that I think is really extraordinary: He has cheaply and entertainingly documented a small but very active subculture -- one that is engaged enough and active enough to have, essentially, developed a lot of their own language and history (THACO, for instance, means To Hit Armor Class 0, something pretty meaningful in the world of gaming -- and a subject of discussion in the film -- but meaningless outside it). And he made the film entirely in the idiom of that subculture, which is so specialized he might have well made it in Yiddish.
This is the sort of opportunity that the digital revolution has created: The chance for people to cheaply make highly personal, idiosyncratic projects about their own experiences. This would have been impossible a few decades ago, because the cost would have been too high and the opportunity to find an audience too limited. Thanks to the Internet, which has shown itself to be remarkably good at building communities based on common interests, Stiteler can market his film directly to a highly specialized niche audience.
I interviewed Stiteler about the film via email:
Bunny: Tell me about how the project got started.
Bill: I wrote THACO in sort of a do-or-die scenario to see if I could write a play. I'd always told myself that I was a playwright, but beyond some short sketches and adaptations, I'd never done anything of my own, an original work.
It's hard for me to express how really depressed I was: I hadn't done any theatre in a year or so--I mean, I wasn't even auditioning--just sort of drifting, and it suddenly hit me how much time I was wasting. So I decided to sit down and write My Play, a play that I would go see. I picked role playing games because they were something I knew a lot about, knew the characters of that world, and the funny things that happened.
The other side of that is that I wanted to document what me and my friends were really like. You see nerds portrayed as social misfits who live in their parents basements and are terrified of girls, even into adulthood. But the nerds I know are married, have jobs and careers, and most of them own homes. And it bugged me, not just because it's a cliche, but because the truth of being a nerd, the way it reprograms your brain, is a lot funnier and a lot weirder.
All of the characters started out being based on me, and different aspects of my personality: in fact, in the play the characters are named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John because I needed to come up with names for four guys who should really all have been named "Bill." As I got into revisions, I started thinking about the guys I knew who were both actors and gamers, and started shifting it to their personalities. Once the play was finally cast and we started rehearsals, every one would pitch in ideas and stories from their past, a lot of which made it into the production. Eventually the characters would up reflecting aspects of themselves to the point where I told them that if they ever forgot a line on stage, they should just start talking normally and the audience wouldn't notice.
I consciously wrote this play for gamers, and made no real attempt to make it accessible to outsiders. I did all the marketing backwards, on purpose. The name of the play is obscure enough, but the only picture I used to advertise it was a twenty-sided die. One of my friends was reviewing shows for the Pioneer Press and I told her *not* to come, because since she wasn't a gamer, she wouldn't get it. She ended up mentioning how weird it was for me to do that, so I got the press anyway.
When we finally did the play, I expected half-full houses (we were in the Acadia, which seated around 88 maximum, as I recall). The first day we were half full, the next night (Sunday at 10 p.m.) we had about 20 people, and both shows they laughed their asses off. And I thought, "okay, I'm happy with this, I did what I set out to do. If this is all I get, that's enough." Then we sold out all of our remaining three shows. The last performance they were pulling tables out so that they could get more people in. It was insane: an act of raging egomania: writing, directing, and acting in a show I wrote about role playing gamers and we sold out three shows. It wasn't supposed to work like that. Freaked me out.
Bunny: What prompted the idea to film the show?
Bill: We had been kicking around the idea of filming the play not long after the Fringe. Halfway through the production one of the actors told me that was actually a market for geek films, and that another one had been pretty successful.
What finally drove me to get off my butt and get started on it (I have a problem with inertia) was that CONvergence, the big Minnesota science fiction/fantasy convention, was having their 10th anniversary and one of the organizers asked if we'd be interested in restaging THACO for their main stage. As I was talking to the actors about it, the idea of doing a DVD came up again.
The big thing that made it happen was that my friend Amanda asked if she and her fiancee TJ and their friend Ry could be part of the crew. They really wanted to work on a film, loved THACO, and had access to some really nice gear. I said yes immediately, which was one of the smartest things I've ever done because before that, I was planning on doing the whole production myself: shooting, sound, and editing. Looking back over the whole process, I probably would have ended up killing myself.
I knew that if we did a film version, I didn't just want to film the play. I wanted to get them out of the house, move them around, because films based on plays can be static enough, but a play about four guys sitting around a table could be death. I thought of a couple of locations we could probably get: a gaming store, a coffee shop, and wrote new material for them, some of which came out of funny stuff we'd thought of during the play, but couldn't find a way to put it on stage.
Bunny: Would you share the details of making the film?
Bill: We shot THACO on weekends over the course of about five months. Everybody worked for free: our budget was spent on MiniDV tapes and pizza for lunch. All the gear (camera, mic) was lent, and TJ (our cinematographer) bought some construction lights from Home Depot to light it. I had been reading Robert Rodriguez's "Rebel Without A Crew" and took his no-budget message to heart: we didn't spend a dime we didn't have to. There's a scene where you see Duck as if he's in jail, light streaming on his face through bars. We shot that by cutting up a pizza box and putting a floor lamp behind it.
Most of the movie was shot in the basement of Duck's house. We brought in our own gaming stuff to dress it. We shot the game store scenes in The Source, which is in Falcon Heights and they were super nice about letting us shoot during business hours--the customers didn't seem to notice us at all! The coffee shop was in a store owned by TJ's dad.
The big lesson out of this for me was: Ask. I'm not cofortable asking for things, and I was absolutely astonished at how generous people were with their time, gear, and locations. People *wanted* to help.
The other big lesson is just how hard it is to make a movie. You have to pay so much attention, it's like making a mosaic out of grains of sand. Someone--in our case, Amanda, who was the patron saint of the production--has to sit with a script and mark down every bit of dialogue to make sure it gets filmed, and where it is on which tape. I can just about wrap my head around a theatre production, where one bit flows into the next, and if you miss something, you can just go back and rehearse it. With a film, you have to think not just about the content, but the transitions and how things will look visually when you put it together.
We premiered THACO at CONvergence in their movie room, Cinema Rex, which is an amazingly curated show. Those guys love movies, and it shows. They show major motion pictures, the Matrix, Star Wars, things like that, but also do personal choices you might not expect, like Moulin Rouge. Now they also show indie films and fan films, and let me tell you, I stopped in to watch a Star Wars fan film and the quality was so high that I just about killed myself: music, camera work, special effects, everything. I'm very proud of THACO, and I think everyone worked their asses off to make it look amazing, but some of these fan films look like pro films.
So, again, I was nervous about how my little film, the first film for *everyone* involved, was going to play. I went in to Cinema Rex for the film before it, and it was full. The film ended, and nobody left. More people came in. Then more people came in and I got this idiot grin on my face. They loved it, laughed all the way through it. At the end of the convention, they do a "dead dog" screening: people vote for a film to be shown again on Sunday, and THACO got the votes, and it was another SRO screening.
As for what happens next, we're going to be screened 4 times at Origins Game Fair, which is a huge RPG convention in Columbus, Ohio, and we're waiting to hear back on our application to be in at DragonCon in Atlanta, which is another biggie.
Bunny: It seems like much of the script is defined by jokes that you would have to be a serious gamer to really appreciate; was there any concern that this might limit the audience for the film, or were you specifically targeting that audience?
Bill: When we did THACO at Fringe, I showed the program to my old boss, Dean J. Seal who taught me more about producing and promotion a show than 6 years of college. He said THACO was a terrible title because nobody knows what it meant. And I said, "It's not for everybody. It's my play for my people in our language. It's my version of Yiddish theatre." And Dean laughed and agreed.
I actually had a director's note apologizing to anyone who wasn't a gamer who got dragged to this show, but I was really surprised to find out how many people who weren't into RPG culture enjoyed the show: some of it you can pick up from context, I guess, and if you're in a relationship with a gamer the things they do in the show, the really nerdy things like dropping a die and *having* to check what it rolled are things they can relate to.
There's a scene where we just rip on every game we can think of for ten minutes, which is what happens when you're trying to figure out what to play. Someone always hates a game for some reason and they have to spell out for you why it's the Worst Game Ever. My favorite response is always that after the show, someone will come up to me and be mad--not that I made fun of their game--but that I left their most hated game out. That scene could go on for an hour.
Bunny: Let's talk a little about the business model, and the cost of doing the project.
Bill: Financially, my goal was to spend absolutely nothing on this film if possible. I'd heard horror stories of people who had spent their life savings on indie movies and ended up not finishing them. So like I said, I bought tapes to record it and pizza so that the cast and crew would have something to lunch on. Every weekend Lund's had two-for-one pizza deals on a different name brand pizza (I wasn't going to feed them crap), and every weekend I bought a large pizza and got one free. So that was the budget for filming.
When we finished making the movie, we thought about sending it to a duplication house, which would have cost us several hundred dollars. And I thought "this is insane." Why should we go off and make this movie--which we were all proud of but hadn't put in front of an audience yet--for next to nothing, then pay some stranger a lot of money just because that's how it was done. I made a deal with the cast and crew to give them a percentage of the profits, after the cost of making the DVDs, so I wanted to keep that cost as low as possible. Each of us owned a computer with a DVD burner, so we all burned a stack of DVDs, which we bought in bulk, 100 for 15 bucks, and made a bare-bones DVD to sell at the convention. After we saw it in front of people, we did a few tweaks and made a "deluxe" DVD with commentary tracks, subtitles, and deleted scenes. That's what we have on sale now, and I hope to sell a lot more of them and get some word-of-mouth going at the upcoming conventions. Our only ongoing cost is buying bulk DVDs and keepcases.
We didn't have a disc printer then, so we bought DVD labels--something I didn't want to do, but we couldn't buy a disc printer in time. After I printed off the labels, there was a bunch of extra stuff left on the label sheet: the middle of the disc, labels for the edge of the keepcase, that we weren't going to use. So I ran the label sheets again and made them into promotional stickers for the film, and passed them out during the convention.
As for telling people that they can share the discs, that's simply a fact of life. You can't stop people from duplicating discs, for one, and to steal a line from Neil Gaiman (who has a cameo in the film), my problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity. I need as many people to know about my film as possible, and the best advertising is still word of mouth. I want people to share my film with their friends, and I'm talking about *lending* here, but I'm no fool. The best I can do is to ask people to watch the film, and if they like it, buy their own copy. The only marketing I'm doing at this point is applying for film festivals. Once that's done, we'll see what kind of word of mouth we're generating.
Our goal was to have fun while making a movie. And everyone had a great time except me, because I was so stressed out making sure everyone was having fun. Getting up at 9 am on a Saturday, in Minnesota, in winter, for five months, and everyone kept telling me what a great time they were having.
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